The claims that earthquakes can fission iron into aluminum and create neutrons in the process is a truly outlandish one, I agree. Especially when you consider that most quakes don't do that, and we haven't really seen evidence from modern quakes that suggest that kind of piezonuclear fissioning occurring... but remember, not all major quakes are created equal, either. There's several factors here that all come together to play a part, and most modern quakes are really set apart from this one due to their location and frequency. Some of those factors — availability of iron to fission, potential for
supershear, proximity to the fault in question, and underground encavement — are all factors that can determine how much pressure a quake exerts on rocks.
Let's start with the obvious:
Iron: Abundant in deserts, scarce in oceans
The majority of earthquakes over magnitude 8 — including the ones capable of sending
tsunamis across entire oceans — are what are called
megathrust quakes, which occur on
subduction zones, where one tectonic place subducts, or slides under, another. Right there, we have a stumbling block to the stresses sufficient to cause piezonuclear neutron generation: subduction zones are incapable of forming on land. When a continent slams into another continent, you don't get a subduction zone, you get a Himalayan-style super-high fold mountain chain, and that's because continental crust is far thicker than oceanic crust. Iron, as we all know, is easily oxidized to water-soluble
iron oxide — which is used to make paints and pigments, among other things — and when that iron oxide then gets dissolved into the ocean (which is salt water, and salt water, as we've seen when steel-bodied cars get rusted very quickly on salted roads, oxidizes iron far more quickly than fresh water does), it ends up being in the ocean, not in the megathrust anymore. Moreover, the only other dry place in the world that's quake-prone — the Mojave Desert — is rich in aluminum, not iron, and of course, given the explanation as to why that can happen given by the Italian scientists who made the rock-crushing piezonuclear discovery, that's exactly what you'd expect from a quake-prone area: aluminum-rich, NOT iron-rich, land. In the ancient Near East, the land was (and still is) far richer in iron, which is exactly why it became a hotbed for the development of Iron Age civilization.
Boom! Supershear shockwaves through the ancient Israeli crust
Caltech professor
Ares Rosakis made quite an alarming discovery about strike-slip quakes along the lines of San Andreas and Dead Sea Transform ones that is also something to consider here: they are capable of rupturing faster than
shear waves can travel, resulting in a seismic Mach cone effect — a literal
sonic boom analog in solid rock. The San Andreas Fault near San Francisco is of course believed to have the real capability of performing such a feat, but further south, uh, not so much. Some of the first signs of damage that suggested supershear quakes were real — buildings literally falling on each other like dominoes — occurred in the
event in Turkey in 1999, and subsequent discoveries suggested that strike-slip faults, as Mode II cracks, are more likely to cause tremendous stresses needed for supershear propagation than Mode III faults like thrust faults and subduction zones. Also, while the San Andreas Fault slips very frequently in small sections, the Dead Sea Transform normally only has small quakes... ah, but M8+ quakes do happen on it, just very infrequently — I'm talking once every 2000-2500 years — and by building up all that stress only to let it go all at once in such long intervals like that (very much like
Cascadia — go figure), the distance it slips can easily, easily result in rupture of supershear fashion. That supershear Mach cone can therefore easily, easily exert enough pressure to fission large amounts of iron into aluminum very quickly as it passes through the area. It's also powerful enough to cause the damage mentioned in scripture... damage like, oh, I don't know, jerking a 2-ton sealed stone out of position! Oh, yeah, and there's also damage in Petra, Jordan — such as rock columns knocked over like dominoes, analogous to the 1999 Izmit damage to buildings — that serves as even more evidence suggesting a supershear event.
The closer to the fault you are, the more you feel it
If the Dead Sea, which the DST lay right under, is any guide, Jerusalem lay within 10 miles of ground zero in terms of a supershear quake like this. The shaking, as a result, would have been terrifyingly violent to say the least... and where the most stress — and, thus, piezonuclear action — occurs, is where you're closest to the unzipping fault. Moreover, if authentic (which this explanation surely would make it so), the Shroud of Turin would be the the closest piece of organic — and, by extension, carbon-datable — material to the fault at that time. What that results in, naturally, is a discrepancy between organic and inorganic materials, not to mention proximity to the fault, that could easily account for the discrepancy between the
14C readings of organic materials far away from the fault and ones close to it.
The one place you do NOT want to be during a supershear quake: underground
Here's probably the most significant factor, which can easily explain why some objects could have gotten hit with more neutrons than others: Almost all the people who weren't dead (and alive again) would have been in buildings, above the ground. Where, of course, the neutrons, being slow ones, would have penetrated carpet, concrete foundation slabs, and maybe low wooden structures... but certainly not entire structures, and moreover, these buildings, being mostly Roman, would have been made of concrete (remember, that's what the Pantheon and Colosseum are made of). Roman concrete, being made of mostly volcanic ash, is notoriously iron-poor, and for that reason, it too would have had a hard time fissioning and producing neutrons. In contrast, Roman tombs — including the ones Jesus was, according to Scriptures, buried in — were literally artificial caves, carved into the ground, into the very iron-rich rock that would have fissioned. For that reason, the neutrons inside a tomb would have been bombarding anything inside it from not just the floor, not just the sepulcher, not just the ceiling, but
from all directions. Easily, easily could have introduced a deluge of foreign carbon-14, of course, and most importantly, high levels of radioactive isotopes would have been created by the neutrons in not just the cloth, but also the body. Given that all the products of neutron capture in the body as a result of the bombardment ― mostly carbon-14, carbon-15, and (especially) phosphorus-32 ― are all beta-minus emitters, this, of course, brings the whole topic right to this 2-year-old particle decay physics hypothesis of mine (note the annotated portion):
If those neutrons, on their way to the body, suddenly get bombarded by outgoing beta-minus particles (electrons, let's not forget) and get converted to antiprotons on their way to the body as this hypothesis based on the current pattern of decay in the quantum world seems to suggest, their annihilation with the body's protons could easily result in the release of enough energy to cause
a literal "Big Bang 2" as physicist Isabel Piczek's determination seems to suggest, which, depending on how it's confined and/or shaped by the topography and/or divine intervention, could then go on to re-coalesce as the resurrected body ― or, in other words, the resurrection itself. I've been searching for an opportunity to test this theory in a particle accelerator for a long time, but given that this event could have actually been real-world manifestation of it, I may not have to.
